Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1969, Ali Velshi grew up in Canada’s financial capital of Toronto. Earning a degree in religious studies from Queen’s University, Ontario in 1994, he made his way into TV, hosting The Business News, Canada’s first prime time financial show. After joining the now defunct CNN Financial News in 2001, Velshi moved over to the mother network where he has been giving user-friendly financial advice to viewers for the last four years as host of Your $$$$$. Since 2007, when he says the economy really began to turn, Velshi has been focused on helping even the most modest of investors weather the storm of the recession. Over the course of our interview, Velshi tackles Swine Flu, says when the recession will be over, and tries to convince us why we should listen to a man with no formal background in economics or finance.

What prompted you to write this book?
Sometime last year it started to occur to me that most of our viewers have some very, very basic questions about how the market works. So the book is actually designed in direct response to questions viewers have asked. It’s meant to give you a lexicon; it’s meant to give you a vocabulary about what’s going on. People have asked me, ‘Why would I buy that book versus someone else’s book?’ My book is for people who are frightened of investing. My book is for people who don’t really think they know anything about it.

What inspired the title?
I’ve called my book Gimme My Money Back because the feeling I got from so many of my viewers is that they did what they were supposed to do. This isn’t like the dot-com bubble where people invested all their money in some stock they had no idea what it was, and how it made money. People did exactly what they were supposed to do; in many cases they followed the rules that I outline in the book, and they still lost their money, so they have the sense that someone took it from them.

The book deals with some very basic economic and investment principles. What makes this information marketable?
It was designed to be short, designed to be inexpensive, designed to be entirely accessible. Once you get to the end of that book, 160 pages later, you can call yourself an investor. You’ve got the basic tools you need to go and invest… my book is probably one of the easiest ways to get yourself up to speed. You might call it the Time Out of business books.

Why did you decide to focus on investing in the stock market?
There are three things that can make you feel wealthy. One is the value of your property going up if you have a house, another one is your wage increasing, and the third one is your money that you’ve saved, the value of that increasing. You have limited control over your property, you have some control but less over your career, [so investment] is the one thing you can do. We are in an environment where control has been snatched from us, and reading this book has helped my viewers feel like they’re a little bit more in control.

The markets are where everyone lost money. Why do you advocate investing now?
What you don’t want to do is to cut off your nose to spite your face. You don’t want to end up sitting it out because you’re mad, while everybody else starts making money again. But what my book advocates is a couple things: one is, don’t invest until you’ve dealt with your credit situation, until you’ve put [in place] an emergency plan. So I’m outlining the fact that you have to be ready to be an investor. Number two: I don’t advocate buying individual stocks. I explain how they work, but I think people should invest in mutual funds or index funds or exchange traded funds. These are available to anybody around the world. And number three: I’m advocating a strategy. I’m not actually telling people to do it: I’m saying understand it and plan. Take the next step if you want by going to a financial advisor, or making some choices, but I stop short of advocating that people [should be] fully invested all the time. I’m advocating knowledge; I’m advocating understanding how it works; and I’m advocating that it’s one of the best ways to actually make money.

Which is your favorite chapter?
Chapter seven, because if you didn’t do anything but go to chapter seven, and answer the risk tolerance questionnaire, it would spit out a pie chart that tells you how to invest. That’s a 15-minute ordeal, and people can actually fix their investments immediately. They can go there, and reallocate, so chapter seven’s the payoff. If you want to know a lot more, you can read a lot more. I’ve got the history of this crisis, I’ve got all sorts of explanations of things, I’ve even told you about the dangerous things I don’t think you should be doing in the market. We’ve discussed financial advisors, but bottom line is if you’re going to be an investor, it’s a few questions, takes you five minutes to answer, and then it tells you how to invest.

Who’s to blame for the financial crisis?
I think it’s a shared responsibility. I think there are many places you can look to for blame. We have society; we have the American dream that has suggested that there will always be more. We have the media that created this impression of how you flip houses, and how you can live a little bigger. But ultimately history will point the finger at the lack of regulation. The fact that the government, I think, was quite pleased that everyone was doing well, and didn’t actually check into what had happened. I mean, on every level, there were the people who valued houses… who knew that if the property value didn’t come in at what the bank wanted, they may not get the bank’s business. People who lied on their mortgage applications, banks that let them get away with it. There’s blame all the way around, but in the end, good regulation would have prevented most of this mess. It would not have prevented a recession. Recessions happen, and they’re meant to happen. It would have prevented the depth of this recession, which as you know, started in the United States and has now spread to the entire world.

How much do you think government should be involved in helping the economy?
I think we have to think about regulation as something that puts rules into place that make playing the game fair. Rules shouldn’t prevent you from playing the game. When you go to play the game, you have to know what the rules are, and they should be consistent. I’m not worried about what the government should and shouldn’t be involved in. I think they should be involved in everything that makes it a level playing field and makes it fair. Sometimes what happens is the pendulum swings too far, and we over regulate, and that hampers business. I think we probably need the pendulum to swing a little far just so everyone can feel safe again because the average investor couldn’t trust the financial industry, they couldn’t trust the government. They need somebody to trust. We have definitely seen regulation come to the forefront about things that governments need to do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. This was a once in a lifetime mess. It was a perfect storm of deregulation, greed, and everything that could go wrong.

What effect do you think Swine Flu has had on the economy?
Very limited, for a couple of reasons. I think if Swine Flu had happened a year ago, before we’d gone through a financial crisis, we would have been all a twitter. The fact is we’re actually toughened. The whole world is toughened. We’ve got a different sense of crisis than we did [before]. We’ve got a different sense of crisis than even when SARS happened. You know crises are always defined as something that was worse than the last time you went through it. So when I talk to people, particularly in Hong Kong, about Swine Flu, they all tell me about their experience with SARS, and compared to that, they think they’ve got this one nailed. I don’t know if that will turn out to be true, but we are simply not as worried about it. We seem to be ahead of the game, we seemed to have learned lessons from SARS. We also seem to have thought that we’ve been through such a big financial pummeling, that the effect of this can’t be anything close to what we just went through.

When do you think the recession will be over?
The sources that I follow, that I think are most accurate, and most reliable, are predicting by the end of summer. But the caveat here is that doesn’t mean you’ll feel it. This recession was on for a year before it was officially declared. So, when you think of how a recession hits somebody, it hits you in the three areas that I talked about: your investments, your home, and your job. Your investments are already recovering if you’re invested. Your home will recover when your home recovers. The job losses worldwide are really devastating, so if you didn’t lose your job, you’re just not feeling the recession as badly as somebody else did. If you did, or if you’re going to, because more jobs will be lost over the course of the next year, the fact that I said the recession’s over, is going to sound like a bit of a joke. So, we have to remember that in this deep and long a recession; the official end of it probably won’t matter to most people.

Who are your sources?
Most of my research is primary, which means that I deal with people who run companies, or analysts. The third primary source, which has probably been my most important, is people. I spend a lot of time talking to people… In the United States I drove across the country in a bus, and stopped in little towns that we don’t typically stop in... I read all the major newspapers, I read the Wall Street Journal, I read the Financial Times, I read the Economist, but the main information actually comes from people.

Does what you learned about religion at university contradict your day job?
Well, I think for a lot of people money is religion. But no, it doesn’t contradict it, you know, one of the things about studying religion that was most interesting to me is that there were these concepts and ideas that were illustrated through analogy and through explanation, and that’s what I do now. It’s taking complicated ideas and finding some way to relate them to you.

Were you a good economics student?
No; never taken an economics course in my life. I have struggled to do so over the years. I wanted to go to Wharton and do my MBA, and just then things got a little bit busy. I have continued to want to go back. I want to do case studies; I want to study economics properly. This has all been on the job. Now the good thing about that is I continue to approach business coverage as an outsider. I think it’s advantageous that we have people who work with us who are very well schooled in economics, and I use economists and analysts and people frequently, but I come at it from the outside. So, my explanation is designed for people who also don’t know about business, and that’s part of why it’s okay to not know for me. I’ve been doing this for a decade, I’ve had 18 years in the news business, and more than ten in this business, so I’ve learned a lot of good stuff along the way.

Laura Sennet

Gimme My Money Back is published by Sterling & Ross 

Ali Velshi’s top five tips for investing:

1.      If you have credit, pay it off.

2.      If you haven’t lost your job, be prepared to do so – it will make it a lot easier when it happens.

3.      Understand your risk tolerance to find out what kind of investor you are.

4.      Invest in a diversified manner in different funds to lower your risk and earn a higher return.

5.      Rebalance your portfolio at least once a year.